Carl Kline

Carl Kline has been a farmhand, a factory worker, a soil conservationist, an actor, a teacher, and a writer who has lived across the United States. He received a BS in Agronomy from Delaware Valley College, worked for the Soil Conservation Service, received a MFA in Theatre from Michigan State University. He started writing poems in Los Angeles in 1991 because he thought that he had something to say. Since then, acting and writing were like two slow horses limping neck and neck. Writing won.

Broken Shoes

There, in the corner

Stand the broken shoes,

Worn, cracked, and puckered,

Ancestral sons, soles of the souls

Who, from scrape to shovel,

Built railroads, bridges, and skylines,

And dangled from a 34th floor I-beam.

That steadied the stirrups of the Pony Express,

Walked behind the great beasts

That tilled the earth and pulled the plow.

That stood strongly beneath

The sweated brow,

The gnarled hands,

The hardened muscles

That crossed the Delaware with General George,

Rode with Paul Revere,

And stormed up Bunker Hill

That marched alongside Johnny,

As he came marching home

From the bloody Civil War

That crawled through barbed wire

And fought trench rot and the Kaiser

From earth encased mazes

That ran ashore at Normandy,

And charged up Pork Chop Hill

With M-1’s blazing

That stepped gingerly over tripwires and

Trudged through the rice paddies

And jungles of ‘Nam

That bore the hot desert sands,

Sidestepped roadside bombings and snipers

In Iraq and Afghanistan

That stooped to pick up scattered pieces of life

And mend broken bones

And stood as symbols of the fallen Warriors

That rose again

With socks pulled up to walk, run and dance

On life’s precarious road of experience, will, and survival,

That collected mud of life

Which seeped into human skin.

There in the corner

Stand the broken shoes

Worn, cracked, and puckered …